After reading Steve’s analogy on software development vs. building bridges, I figured it would be easier to convey some of my own thoughts in a post vs. comments. Being raised around engineering and architectural practices and now working in the software industry, there are some very clear differences in the disciplines. I to get…

In the lifetime of a case, particularly one of high impact, a point is reached where a decision is necessary regarding the direction of the case. This decision impacts how the situation is approached going forward. The decision that must be made is: “Do I want Root Cause or Relief?” This decision is…

As Naresh pointed out in his history of content conversion blog, Exchange 2000 swapped the roles of our primary transport from X.400 to SMTP. As such we also more closely integrated in native MIME formatted message into Exchange store by introducing the .STM file. We are unfortunately bound by the fact that our richest…

Part of my role is to understand trends and determine how technically we can solve our supportability issues. While performing some reviews of cases related to store startup, I was shocked at the number of cases where the 16GB limit of the standard version of Exchange was reached. For the standard version of Exchange you are…

This is an issue that I ended up spending 6 hours debugging, only because the answer could not be found in any documentation. I know as soon as I post this someone will go post a comment saying “duh, its documented right here <link>” The scenario is a customer was attempting to give permissions to…

An issue came up this week that I feel is worth making Exchange Admins aware of. The symptoms of the problem is transaction logs growing uncontrollably on the Exchange Server (as high as 1000 logs per an hour). However there is no growth encountered in the EDB or STM files. Obviously this resulted in log…

Learning Essentials Ever wonder how we internally develop our people? How our top people continue to develop? As one might expect we do REQUIRE the technical staff of Product Support Services (PSS) to maintain their MCSE/MCSD certification. However, this is largely accomplished on the individual’s own time. The program new hires are put through…

I’ve been putting together several postings regarding the VSAPI including background, architecture, performance, and troubleshooting analysis for the Exchange Team blog. The first one just went live… http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/10/20/245157.aspx Keep an eye out for future post regarding the VSAPI over the coming days… – Jeremy

In my role I interact with a lot of developers and it is continuously amazing how naive an individual can be regarding the interactions their own code has with other components. I’ll shorten this example to the critical points… In one instance I recall conversing with a developer regarding a performance issue in their code…

<sigh> So this issue was incredibly interesting, but you know at the end it just makes you mad. This past week a customer was having a very clear cut, reproduciable issue: When attempting to attach an item to a message via OWA, the Information Store would crash with what appeared to be stack corruption. Boy,…